Not all that great
Here’s a thing that makes me angry.
In this video for example. You can hear people bellowing “Allahu akbar” as the boy is pulled out – that’s all you can hear them bellowing.
Allah is great because he (definitely he) allowed them to rescue one child? Why not just not do the earthquake???
It’s so Stockholm syndrome. This guy who has killed my whole family and most of the people in my city and 20 thousand and counting total – he’s great because he cut me a tiny break.
It’s not just Allah, either. I notice myself blurting “thankgod” in moments of intense relief. I’ve never been able to think of any good substitute, either – “thank fuck” is all very well but it’s kind of imprecise.
Anyway, I wish humans could get out of the habit. Gods aren’t our friends. If they were they would have clued us in about global warming at least 150 years ago.
You could try, “Thank Joe Pesci.” Always worked for George Carlin.
The problem, if it is a problem, is that that sense of relief is so very close to gratitude that there might as well be no difference. Undirected gratitude doesn’t sit well, so we need something or someone to thank. Maybe it’s partly a consequence of language. It also feels weird to just say, “Is raining,” after all, and that’s entirely a linguistic peculiarity.
I know. Hence the automatic “thankgod.” It’s so irritating though.
The “It’s raining” thing is mostly English, plus a handful of other languages like French that require an expressed subject (technically, it’s an areal feature). Spanish is pretty typical in that regard–you just say “Llueve” (or “Está lloviendo”). In Turkish, certain transitive verbs require an object, so you would say “Yağmur yağıyor” (roughly “raining rain”–“it’s snowing” is “Kar yağıyor”).
Point being, there’s really no sense of agency there, whereas the “Thank god”/”Gracias a dios”/”Allahu akbar” reflex really does reflect a sense that god is responsible for the good outcome (even if for a lot of us we don’t really feel that way). It’s the same attitude that leads people to say things like “It wasn’t my turn” or “God has a plan for me.”
Similarly, after plane crashes where there were some survivors, gratitude to a god who didn’t save everyone always sounds off.
The corollary, “God’s plan for you was to die,” though not usually said out loud, is, perforce, always present.
Then again, the older and less mobile I get, the more religious I find myself becoming, and ever more frequently saying this one simple prayer: ‘God help us.’ Never though in the form of God.! Help us.!
Though maybe it’s worth a try.
May I humbly suggest “thank Bruce”?
I regard “thank God”, “God bless you”, or for that matter “oh my fucking God”, as mere conventional figures of speech. Even if the world were to turn atheist tomorrow I suspect they’d remain. I also don’t mind calling the annual winter holiday Christmas any more than I mind the days of the week being named for pagan dieties. Yeah, I know pagan beliefs don’t have the status and influence of the Abrahamic faiths these days. But there are bigger fish to fry.
Russian: Идёт дождь. Literally: Rain goes/(is) going.
Irish Gaelic: Tá sé ag cur baistí. Literally: It [masculine] is putting rain. You could also say something like, “Ta sneachta ag titim,” which is, “Snow is falling.” Irish is a little hard to pin down, as dialects differ substantially. One of the consequences of England’s attempt to stamp the language out, I suppose.
Japanese: 雨が降っている。Literally: Rain (is) falling.
Learning other languages’ idioms made me somewhat forgiving of phrases like, “Thank God.” I mean, in Irish, you say hello with, “Dia dhuit,” which literally means, “God be with you.” And you respond by one-upping the blessing by including Mary, “Dia is Muire dhuit.” This can get silly, because you can lead off with something like, “God, Mary, Patrick, and Brigid be with you,” which still demands one-upmanship.
After a moment’s thought, I grant that the casual invocations of God in ordinary casual usage are an entirely different matter than what inspired Ophelia’s post.
I think that it’s more a case of worrying that natural disasters are a result of insufficiently placating the gods. “If we don’t keep thanking Allah for small mercies, He’ll visit even worse things on us.”
OB:
AND God decided to plonk that damned talking snake into the Garden of Eden, from whence it all went downhill. God has no out from that. He/she/it claims omniscience and omnipotence AND to having been taken by surprise by a future he/she/it did not (?) see coming. ????
But for that clumsy error on God’s part, Eden would have just kept on expanding. Free beer in all the pubs, no car accidents, traffic jams, wars or revolutions; heavenly music playing out of all mobile phones, tannoys, etc. Every day a holiday for all. Lions lying down with lambs all over the planet.
I could go on.
“It takes a very special and strong-minded kind of atheist to jump up and down with their hand clasped under their other armpit and shout, “Oh, random-fluctuations-in-the-space-time-continuum!” or “Aaargh, primitive-and-outmoded-concept on a crutch!””
-Terry Pratchett
Re “that sense of relief is so very close to gratitude that there might as well be no difference”: that’s a good observation. I consciously try to avoid expressing actual gratitude unless there is a person involved; I try to use “I’m so glad” or “How fortunate” or “Phew”. (I don’t agree with the common advice about how we should feel more gratitude; I suspect humility, and the realization that other people as well as dumb luck play significant roles in our lives, might be a better phrasing.)
In this case, though, I think they really are expressing gratitude to a god. As Betty Bowers put it, thanking a serial killer for killing the family next door. I see it all the time; Facebook posts or newspaper articles about how great God is when someone survives a tornado or hurricane. Why the people whose families were wiped out and homes destroyed should proclaim how great this god is, is not at all clear to me.
I like Tim Minchin’s take on the issue in his song ‘Thank You God”.
God’s only excuse is that he doesn’t exist.
That’s a pretty good one though…
Sackbut, my last year in Oklahoma, the state was on fire constantly. I was watching the news and one man was explaining how he kept his house from burning by hosing it and doing all the recommended things. He lost nothing, and his dog sat in the front seat of the car watching him.
His neighbor lost almost everything in a fire because he was praying instead of hosing; he went on and on and on about how great God was to spare his family. None of them died, and he got away even with his dog.
Which one do you think got the air time? The one noting that his own wise actions saved his house? Or the one that thanked God for not burning him up with his house? Which one did the governor go on TV with? Somehow, I don’t imagine you’ll have too much problem guessing.
Or calling official days off “holidays”, or going on holiday, etc.
In some cases (‘holiday’ is a good one), it’s a case of linguistic shift. ‘Holiday’ is pretty much ‘any day I ain’t gotta drag my ass to work’, these days, and that’s fine. I don’t object to “good-bye”, either, even though it’s got a similar religious derivation.
‘Bless you’ for sneezing is a middle-ground. I’ve really been working on “gesundheit” (which just translates to ‘good health’).
But yeah, Ophelia’s post falls well into the infuriating category, along with similar serious/literal invocations of divine providence.
It just is very stark – pulling a child out of a heap of rubble that killed 50? 100? 200? people and exclaiming that ONE person saved from that mass slaughter=god is great.
Imagine some German troops forcing everyone in the French village into the square to be shot, and when it’s over the commanding officer pulls one living kid from the heap of bodies. Great? Nope.
It’s an odd one because aren’t we also meant to believe that the afterlife is better than this one? Somehow “thank you god, for almost crushing this innocent child, keeping him trapped in pain and fear under the rubble for days, and allowing him to be rescued and continue living in a literal disaster zone which will take decades to rebuild (provided he gets through the immediate aftermath of the earthquake involving lack of food, shelter, clean water, and medical support), instead of taking him into your loving arms like you did the rest of his family”
Ah yes, so we are. That one always seems to me a matter of believing and not believing at the same time. Or believing in a formal sort of way but not believing when shit gets real.